Dreaming in Books - uncopy

Bibliographic Subjects / 13
(and internationally minded) writers for whom the book would become a
vital source of creative energy and literary innovation. Such romantic writers
did not write around writing, in Kittler’s formulation, but crucially wrote
about writing itself. Their writing can be read as a philosophy of bibliographic
communication. 65 As the double meaning of Goethe’s hypothesis,
“everything is leaf / page,” suggested, romantic naturalism was merely the
fl ipside of romantic bibliographism: not just a media fantasy but a fantasy
of media as well. For the main writers that I discuss here—J. W. Goethe,
E. T. A. Hoffmann, Walter Scott, Washington Irving, Sophie Mereau, Edgar
Allan Poe, Honoré de Balzac, and Stendhal—the book played an essential
role in the larger aesthetic aims of their work. In thinking about the nature
of the book, they were thinking about the nature of literature. For such romantic
authors, composition was inspiration.
The larger aim of this book is to see the way such romantic writers were
not opposed to, or even distinct from, a larger industry that was emerging
in the nineteenth century to coordinate and organize what Roger Chartier
has called the “order of books,” 66 but rather to see their work as an integral
component in what we might call the naturalization of the book in the
nineteenth century. Their “imaginative” texts, I want to suggest, served a
similar function to such bibliographic reference works like J. K. Hinrich’s
Verzeichniß der Bücher und Landkarte (founded in 1797), A. J. Q. Beuchet’s
Bibliographie de la France (founded 1811), Martin Schrettinger’s Versuch eines
vollständigen Lehrbuchs der Bibliothek- Wissenschaft (1808), or T. H. Horne’s
Introduction to the Study of Bibliography (1814) that all emerged to map and
make sense of this new, and increasingly tumultuous, landscape of books.
The work of romantic writers—both their books and their fi ctions—
functioned as a key space where the changes to the material conditions of
writing and communication that defi ned the nineteenth century could be
rehearsed, interrogated, and ultimately normalized. The historical signifi -
cance of such romantic writers lies precisely in the extraordinary extent to
which they addressed—through books—questions posed by the immense
reorganization of human subjectivity around books, what it meant in Menzel’s
words to “dream in books.”
Romanticizing Books
Few historical narratives have been more durable than those surrounding
the impact of the printed book. Gutenberg’s invention, so we have been
told, gave rise to a medium that made ideas more stable, repeatable, sequential,
national, and above all else, individual. The printed book’s physical